I’m two chapters in to Mark Lee Gardner’s book “Rough Riders”. It’s about Teddy Roosevelt and the Spanish/American war in Cuban. I’m going to try something new and start blogging my thoughts about the book as I’m reading before I do an actual review.
My first thought is who you know matters. In the book Teddy Roosevelt and his friend, Captain Leonard Wood, get their commissions to go to Cuba because Roosevelt is the undersecretary to the Secretary of War. But he’d spent years trying to make sure that when America went into a new war that he would be there. He was influenced by the stories of glory he heard as a young child during the Civil War. So he positioned himself in such a way that when war was declared he would make it onto the battlefield.
My second thought is that knowing what you want will make it so that when opportunity presents itself, you are ready to take advantage of it. Teddy Roosevelt knew that he wanted to go to war because he wanted to earn military glory. He referred to it as his “one chance to cut my little notch on the stick that stands as a measuring rod in every family’. He truly believed that military service was the stick by which all families should be measured, so when the opportunity came, he was ready to grab it.
My third thought was about humility. When the Secretary of War Russell Alger commissioned his unit, he offered the Colonel position to Roosevelt, but Roosevelt declined it. Why? Because he knew he didn’t have the experience to do the job well. He wanted his friend Leonard Wood to take the the title and he would be second in command. Alger thought he was nuts because he could take the position and have the glory and make Wood the do the work. Roosevelt refused out of both humility and integrity,. It reminds me of the C.S. Lewis quote “humility is not thinking less of yourself. It is thinking of yourself, less.”
Those are my thoughts for now. Like I said “I’m only two chapters in but I’m really enjoying it.
